Carter Clay (16 page)

But that was the Katherine of the past. That was the Katherine who believed it was wrong to feel superior to other people, and also acknowledged that she felt superior quite often. That was the Katherine who said (page 25 of Jersey's journal), “I travel a small circle some days. Puffing myself up, recognizing it, deflating myself again.”

Since the accident, the engine that drives Katherine's smiles and grimaces now produces such different effects that often even her face seems altered; indeed, a great patch of red now marks her left cheek—a typical blemish for the head-injury patient, the doctors say. Too: Katherine's gaze is slightly cockeyed, and the bright tracheostomy scar at the base of her throat gives her the look of someone rescued from hanging or torture.

“Arrh!” For quite a while, “Arrh!” made up the whole of Katherine's vocabulary. She graduated to “Shit!” at about the same time that she stopped having spasms—slashing motions of
the right hand that, before restraint, dug bloody gouges across her chest. “Shit!” Shouted at the Fair Oaks aides and residents and visitors and walls and a light in the eyes or a dish of lime gelatin dessert—

Everyone gave a nervous smile when Katherine first said, “Shit.” As if they believed she would never have known such a word before the accident. As if her injuries had made it possible for the word to enter her vocabulary in much the same way that they had allowed in the infections that left her packed in ice for almost two weeks.

Jersey knew better. She had a mother who said “Shit” at missed turns, mislaid briefcases, spilled milk. Sometimes, in fact, Jersey found Katherine's language a bit of an embarrassment: Irked by a fad in expensive T-shirts that declared that the T-shirts' owners felt
NO FEAR
, Katherine borrowed the manufacturer's ragged calligraphy to write on a T-shirt of her own,
SCARED SHITLESS
. Worse, she insisted upon wearing her T-shirt to the university on the day she gave her undergraduate group its spring final.

Usually, it is true, after Katherine said “Shit” in Jersey's presence, she apologized. Still, Jersey would have liked to defend her mother's use of the word, to insist that it was a sign of returning health rather than an aberration. But suppose that, knowing this, the hospital personnel liked her mother less. There were plenty of people who didn't like her mother when she was whole, before the accident; and now she really needed all the friends that she could get.

“Shit,” says Jersey as she sets the family photo back on her grandmother's entertainment center.
“Shit.”
Quite loud.

M.B.—just then washing down her vitamin C with a gulp of wine—looks up, both guilty and shocked. “Jersey?” She makes her voice a little sharp. “Did you say something to me?”

“No.”

True but not true enough, and the lie in the answer leaves the girl painfully empty. No one knows her anymore, and because no one knows her, she no longer seems to know herself. Who is she now? She has gone out into the world and discovered
that she is A Girl in a Wheelchair, and that the grip of this image chokes the breath from every other possibility. Jersey understands that the fact of her body in the Theralife 504 makes people think of things they would rather not think of at all—
that could be us
—and so Jersey has put away her body. It has become a thing to be attended to, like the cage of a dumb pet (hamster, turtle). Before the accident—though she would not have admitted it—she liked to go without socks so she could see her pretty ankle bones, which looked almost chipped from stone. Now, those slim ankles are gone forever, replaced by something mottled and soft that she does not want to see at all. The beginnings of breasts—she had been fond of them, too, but now she finds them loathsome, obscene. In February, when she began to menstruate, she did not telephone her best friend back in Arizona, Erin Acuff, although the two had shared an intense interest in all such matters, had stolen the literature accompanying the tampons in their mothers' cupboards, and been mutually confounded by the pale cross section of the woman who demonstrated, one thigh raised, knee bent, the insertion—
where
?—of that plug of cardboard and cotton.

Together, Jersey and Erin Acuff had enacted scenes from
Little House on the Prairie
and the other Laura Ingalls Wilder books; one Christmas, they exchanged the deliciously humble gifts that Ma and Pa Ingalls had given to Mary and Laura (a tin cup, a penny, a piece of peppermint candy). Later they became obsessed with learning the whole of A
Little Night Music, Into the Woods
, and
Sweeney Todd.
They took Saturday classes at the Seca Children's Museum and, all through fifth and sixth grades, carpooled to swim club and home again each weekday morning at five-thirty. Just that June they had finally received permission to walk to day camp at the university on their own.

These days, when Erin Acuff and Jersey speak on the telephone—an event that occurs less and less often—Jersey can scarcely hear Erin because of the noise raised by the facts of her own life: squeals and bangs, the sounds of the rodent trapped within her racing round and round on its wheel. To shut out that racket, Jersey must almost shout. And speak very fast. While Erin
and Jersey talk, twin drips of sweat trace Jersey's rib cage, draw moist seams along her edges. Recently, after a particularly awkward conversation, Jersey steeled herself and immediately punched Erin's number into the telephone once more.

“Erin,” she said, “it's me again. I just—you know, if there's anything you want to ask about, like my wheelchair or anything, feel free.”

Erin Acuff did not know what to say to her old friend. Perhaps she could have borne to read a book that explained the details of Jersey's altered body and life, but she was terrified of entering too intimately into Jersey's new world. Also, it seemed to Erin, now, that she had been feeling distant from Jersey even before the accident, hadn't she? She had a feeling—irrational, but deep—that in becoming a cripple Jersey had gone and done something that kids their age were not supposed to do.

These were things, of course, that she could not say, and in an attempt to draw Jersey back into the world they had shared before the accident, Erin teased, in the voice of Angela Lansbury as
Sweeny Todd's
Mrs. Lovett, “I'm sure it's a perfectly lovely chair, dearie! But promise you won't run over me foot when we meet again!”

In
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, the aliens chase the hero and his friends through a tunnel. Always a menacing place, a tunnel, there being only the beginning and the end as points of escape. The aliens who pour from the tunnel look like anyone—Jersey, M.B., you, me. One of them bears a remarkable resemblance to Finis Pruitt, who is, indeed, a kind of body snatcher, though of his own devising, his own invention.

By 1975 the site of Finis's birth had been completely devoured by open-pit copper mining and no longer appeared on the maps. Finis enjoyed the fact. To commemorate the occurrence—and as a goof on Gertrude Stein—he composed the following two-line poem:

It would have pleased Finis immensely to have been able to tell someone that he had invented his own past, but who would have made a sufficiently appreciative audience? Stein herself? God?

Who knows? And wouldn't it have depended on Finis's mood?

After all, on the day of the accident, when Finis came to behind the tangerine-colored garage, his mood was such that he cried. The pale patches of dusk beyond the privet hedge baffled him completely: were they so many handkerchiefs spread out to dry? And where was he?

On the pile of firewood belonging to the garage owner. On a pallet fashioned of what seemed to be the softer items from his cart.

His entire head hurt—though Finis often pretended to drink, he rarely did—but it was the sparking and combusting pain in the right side of his face that made him remember the day, the accident, and his failure—once again—to kill Carter Clay.

“Jesus fuck!” he cried. At that moment, there was not a crumb of improvisation left within him. With caution, he climbed down from the woodpile and made his way toward the dull glimmer of the shopping cart. Something crinkled as he moved. Beneath his jacket. A twenty-dollar bill and a note, both attached by tiny holes to the buttons on the front of his shirt. In the dim light, he struggled to read:

Sorry about your jaw, buddy. Had to take off.

What the hell? Finis flipped the note over. The reverse side gave mimeographed instructions on how to get to an upcoming picnic for AA members and their families.

“Nietzsche? You here?”

Carefully—though without much hope—Finis went through the items that Clay had piled back into the cart. Found the ferret's makeshift cage, broken and empty. “Nietzsche?” After a bit more searching toward the core of the cart's contents, Finis's hand closed around a familiar, solid weight that made him shake his head in wonder:

The Colt. That crazy Clay had left him the Colt. Discreetly wrapped in a T-shirt and a pair of boxer underwear.

On their trip from Arizona to Florida, the Milhause-Alitz family stopped in Texas to view Shankar Chatterjee's fossils of
Protoavis.
In
Protoavis's
pneumatized skull, modified temporal region, and relatively large braincase, Katherine saw a primitive bird. A specimen that predated
Archaeopteryx
by at least seventy-five million years. A bird coeval with Triassic dinosaurs.

Joe, on the other hand, saw a specimen whose reconstruction he believed to be a botch. While Katherine oohed and aahed, Joe squinted out a window at a scissortail just then perching on a handy strand of telephone wire. Joe remained on excellent terms with the theory that had established his and his colleagues' reputations twenty years before: that little flycatcher, just then so carefully preening against the Texas sky, was—like all birds—
descended
from a dinosaur, perhaps
T. rex
itself.

Did Joe's training of Katherine provide for the possibility of his own overthrow? Yes. This, of course, is the proper path of scientific knowledge.

In his reluctance to admit change, then, Joe was very much like the pastor of M.B.'s church.

Silver-haired Pastor Bitner of Vineyard Christian is a nice man, a true friend and servant to his parishioners. However, Pastor Bitner's desire to protect the biblical world—its oil lamp lighting so lovely, so golden; its ability to examine minutiae limited
to what can be observed by the naked eye—Pastor Bitner's desire to keep that world from advancing into the chillier and more brightly lighted domains of scientific theory and discovery moves him to perversity. With indomitable—and uninformed—authority, Pastor Bitner's sermons render the theory of evolution mere fodder for the generation of Sunday sermon belly laughs. For the amusement of his parishioners, Pastor Bitner is only too happy to grin and rub his hands together while he extrapolates from the oh-so-funny thoughts of molecular physicists.

“Get this, folks:
God
didn't make you! Hydrogen gas made you! That's right.” Pastor Bitner wags a playful finger at the congregation that spreads out before him in a fan of pews made of that same blond oak Finis Pruitt hated so in the Oneco library. The members of Vineyard Christian are a mixed group, but they give an overall impression of homogeneity due to a predominance of clothing the color of party mints and made of fabrics composed in large part from materials that decayed in permeable sediments laid down during the Tertiary era—an era in which Pastor Bitner's parishioners do not believe.

Pastor Bitner's parishioners believe in nothing more than a few days older than Adam. How pleasant they find the notion that they are descended from no one but that old boy and his gal, upon whom God bestowed dominion over all the beasts of the earth.

“Now don't laugh, folks,” Pastor Bitner says—laughing—“this is what the evolution scientists would have you believe!”

Giggles erupt here and there. The children of the congregation do not understand what is funny, but they want to laugh, too. Dads are laughing. Some moms are laughing, while others—this group includes M.B. Milhause—only allow themselves faint smiles, believing a good Christian woman doesn't show her teeth during Sunday service.

“But seriously, folks,” Pastor Bitner continues, “you and I know that the Bible tells us, very clearly, how God created man, and, folks, the Bible does not lie. You cannot believe you were created in the image of God
and
created by a bunch of hydrogen gas. You cannot believe that there were creatures on earth who
lived and died before the creation of man!
Death
was God's penalty for Adam's sin! But Jesus came to take away the sins of the world, folks, and when he took the sins away, at that precise moment, and only at that moment, did he restore us to grace and eternal life!”

On their own, the members of Pastor Bitner's flock rarely worry about the validity of the theory of evolution. M.B. herself was surprised the first time Pastor Bitner raised the subject. M.B. assumed evolution to be some queer obsession that only her daughter and a few other odd ducks gave the time of day—a little like listening to opera, or studying a foreign language.

However, M.B. finds Pastor Bitner's arguments against evolution—unlike Kitty's arguments for it—just plain fun. They make churchgoing feel like those school field trips where getting educated involved eating glazed doughnuts at the bakery or sliding down the firemen's brass pole.

“The evolution fellows want us to believe that since a human being's genetic material is ninety-seven percent the same as the genetic material of a chimpanzee, you and I only missed being a chimp by three percent!” Pastor Bitner laughs. “Folks, to clarify the holes in this kind of thinking, consider: a cloud is one hundred percent water while a watermelon's ninety-seven percent water. Would that convince you that a watermelon missed being a cloud by only three percent?”

This time the entire congregation—minus one soul—laughs along with the preacher. And who
is
that large man of shaven head and indeterminate age who sits in the next to last pew and looks so grave?

Carter Clay. Who has not only begun working as an aide at Fair Oaks Care, and continued to remain sober, but—upon determining that Vineyard Christian was Marybelle Milhause's church of choice—taken to attending services there each Sunday, and then again on Wednesday, potluck night.

Carter Clay's body still vibrates, now and again, with the blows that his van delivered to the Alitz/Milhause family; hence Carter Clay takes Pastor Bitner's sermons seriously. On his first visit, Carter came close to tears when Pastor Bitner spoke of the
parable of the laborers in the field. Carter
saw
those laborers and their master bathed in a pure and liquid light, a mercurial shimmer that outlined their edges at the close of the working day, and he understood that Pastor Bitner was saying: even at the last minute of the hour, the man who came to believe could receive God's treasure in full.

Thus far, however, Carter has failed to gather the requisite courage to speak to Marybelle Milhause at either Vineyard Christian or Fair Oaks Care, Thus far, the girl, Jersey, has not come to church with her grandmother. But Carter feels certain he will find a way to meet both girl and grandmother soon.

At Fair Oaks, Carter has twice managed to be the one to help Katherine Milhause to the dining room, and on a number of occasions, while Katherine dully waited in the hall, Carter changed her bedding or mopped her floor—praying all the while:
Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive—

Carter does not
like
to see Katherine Milhause, of course, but he recognizes that she is, as Pastor Bitner would say, his cross, and that he must welcome all opportunities to help her. Really, until a week ago, Carter tended to see Katherine as more messy and moody than ruined. He was badly shaken, then, last Wednesday, when a couple came to call on her. Carter first caught a glimpse of the pair while repositioning an old fellow across the way, and then later he saw the couple again, in the hall, looking around as if for help. A man and a woman. Both of them younger than Carter, but appearing worn, almost ill. The man explained that they had come all the way from Arizona to visit Dr. Milhause. They wanted to show her some slides—the man held a slide projector in his arms, and he raised it, as if for proof. Would it be possible, he wondered, for them to borrow a sheet for a screen?

Carter was saying sure, no problem, when without warning the woman pressed her face into the man's shoulder and began to cry—deep, hard sobs. Her companion shook his head. Voice low, he said to Carter, “We were close friends of Dr. Milhause.”

Carter nodded, but as he hurried off to fetch a sheet, he felt a chill at the way the man spoke as if the Katherine Milhause he and the weeping woman knew were dead; it was only from loyalty
to
that
Katherine Milhause that they meant to treat the resident in #112 as if she were still among the living.

Had Carter happened to go to the church the Sunday
before
the accident, he would have seen, only inches from where he now sits, the intact Katherine Milhause smiling and nudging her mother as she whispered, “This is so crazy! Your minister guy looks just like the nut who preaches outside my office!”

“Pastor Bitner is not nuts!” said M.B., and Katherine sighed, and said, “Of course not,” and felt sorry she had thought to offer up poor St. Tom to her mother at all.

Pastor Bitner paused in his sermon. Was he smiling at Katherine? Just in case, she smiled back, though she was a little alarmed by the pastor's teeth. So white-white! Were they really real?

“Disease, injustice, economic slavery”—Pastor Bitner made a wild flourish, drew both hands to his chest—“these are the fruit of man's decision to reject God in order to be”—he raised his fingers to scratch quotation marks in the air—“‘
independent.
' Folks, are you saved? Will you go to heaven when you die? The Bible tells us: Ye must be born again. All this talk today about self-esteem!” Pastor Bitner screwed up his mouth and cringed. “They're asking, ‘Do you feel good about yourself?' Folks, feeling good about yourself will take you straight to hell if you're not saved!”

Katherine smiled and turned to her mother to whisper, “So did you tell him I was coming today?”

“Sh!”

Katherine continued to smile. Despite—or because of—a tendency toward gloom, Katherine insisted upon exhibiting both humor and optimism whenever possible. Proof: in attending services at Vineyard Christian with M.B., Katherine believed absolutely—and mistakenly—that her polite interest in M.B.'s church would lead her and M.B. to respect of one another's views.

(“So, M.B.,” she had said as they came into view of Vineyard Christian—a young but weary-looking building the color of baked salmon—“so what exactly does your church believe?”

M.B. bent down to crumble the frowsy tip of a juniper branch that poked out into the sidewalk. “Someone should chop that thing down,” she said, because actually she had little idea what Vineyard Christian believed, and felt the need to practice a tone of hauteur before replying, “It's
Christian
, Kitty. We believe the Bible. That's the main thing.”)

M.B. did not want her daughter to know what she hardly acknowledged herself: that she had initially resumed going to church in order to counter Patsy Glickman's talk of “temple”; and that she had selected Vineyard Christian as her church for the same reason that she had selected Walgreen's and Winn-Dixie for her drug and grocery stores—all three were within walking distance.

Having to explain the latter to Kitty would have meant revealing to both Kitty and herself that she had not been able to bring herself to unlock the doors of the white LTD in lot H since Lorne's death. Why? Because the LTD was Lorne's car? And in the past, M.B. had always asked Lorne for permission to drive the car? Could that be it? M.B. did not think so and preferred not to think of the matter at all. She had learned, thank you kindly, to think about her eternal salvation rather than to worry over how independent a woman she was; and Pastor Bitner seemed to know just what she needed to hear on that score.

“Folks”—Pastor Bitner lowered his head in a way that M.B. could appreciate for both its dramatic flair and its modesty—“there's something a whole lot better for us to do than sit in front of our mirrors and tell ourselves we're fine and dandy. I don't know about you, folks, but I think I'm better off down on my knees, spending part of my day in the presence of God. That way”—Pastor Bitner grinned—“when I get to those pearly gates, I won't be in danger that the Savior's going to take a look at me and ask, ‘Now, who might
you
be?'”

At this bit of fun, the congregation laughed in delight. Katherine laughed, too, and M.B. felt some relief that her daughter's visit had not fallen the week before, when Pastor Bitner had gone on at length about his miraculous prayer-based recovery from a five-inch-long festering wound he had received while a
high school hurdle jumper; and his opinion that a person should avoid drinking from plastic cups. However, when Katherine whispered a shamefaced “Sorry,” M.B. realized that Katherine had
not
been laughing along with Pastor Bitner—she had been laughing at a teenage boy three rows up, who wore a T-shirt across the back of which he had painted in an ugly scrawl,
FEAR GOD
.

M.B. stared at Katherine. A grown woman, yet her cheeks vibrated with suppressed laughter.
Fear God.
M.B. did not see anything at all funny about that.